Via the Coney Island Mermaid Parade Facebook page this afternoon:
Hot off the presses, the stunning 2013 Mermaid Parade Poster by Frank Kozik!
To register, find more info, etc., go here.
Hot off the presses, the stunning 2013 Mermaid Parade Poster by Frank Kozik!
I would love to see a follow-up story on Citi Bikes that looks at how they are being used in the neighborhood. I've noticed that many of the racks along Avenue B and C are completely empty in the mornings and full in the evenings, so it seems like there is a pretty sizable contingent of people using them to commute.
The whole experience was rather simple. I believe this is the point of the bike. Somehow this act has become 'controversial' in New York. Sharing bicycles. …Some of the arguments against bike share are just confusing. I don’t know how to handle the argument that we don’t need bike share because everyone who wants to bike already owns a bike. That’s like saying that we don’t need restaurants because everybody has a kitchen.
I don’t know what to do with the argument that bike share stations take up valuable space on a public street. You know what is also taking up valuable space on a public street? Your car. My car.
I don't know if it's actually controversial or it's just fun to make it sound controversial because that is what New York does. ... If anything, the 'outcry' about bikes sounds more like a last gasp, the same kind of gasp that always happens when a city is confronted with change.
The new Citi Bike program in New York seems to have proven hugely popular: In just 10 days, they have been ridden more than 100,000 times.
Actually the real estate moguls who shape NYC like so much silly putty in their dirty little hands have a few other names planned for the area formerly known as the East Village:
SoFaBo: South of Facebook
NoFaBo: North of Facebook
ZuckerVille: where Mark Zuckerberg lives, right next to FarmVille.
LoJackita: the neighborhood to which your car was towed to make room for the new CitiBike racks.
BroHo: in honor for the residents who have recently moved in from places like Ohio. As in, "Yo bro, you seen my ho?" Also known as WooHooville.
Stuyversy: The merger beween Stuytown and Gramercy into one giant neighborhood with lots of trees, no stores, and thousands of drunk NYU students. You'll know you live there when they raise your rent mid-lease by 50% and you have to move out.
CitiBike City: for the place formerly known as Alphabet City. Avenue A will be Adventure Avenue, B will be Bankster Boulevard, C will be Cupcake Drive, and D will still be Avenue D, since no developer can ever seem to figure out how to gentrify it.
There is no more charming, lively and exciting neighborhood in Manhattan than the East Village. It is alive with history, culture and creativity — but living here can be a challenge. Most residential buildings are over 100 years old and built to a scale unsuited to contemporary lifestyles. Many find the compromise worth it. But the Jefferson provides perfect answer, with no compromise required.
UPDATE: Due to inclement weather, tonight's screening of ROMEO + JULIET has been postponed until Thursday, AUGUST 15th. Films In Tompkins will resume as schedule next Thursday with O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU.
Now, as warm weather returns to the east coast, Johnston, 30, is spreading her message in Philadelphia, but scaling it back a notch by covering her nipples with a pair of pasties. She was spotted in Philly’s Rittenhouse Square yesterday, according to New Jersey 101.5. Apparently, she is a native of the City of Brotherly love. Johnston also said her mom is a breast cancer survivor who supports her nude endeavors.
According to the Massey Knakal Web site, the building was sold in January 2009 for $12.3 million. As the site noted: "The lot measures 114’9” x 88’and has a total buildable square footage of approximately 36,125 sq. ft. for residential use or 68,262 sq. ft. for a community facility, which will likely be the ultimate use of the property."
Turns out the buyer was Arun Bhatia, who currently has plans in place for a dorm at the former 35 Cooper Square. And the developer filed plans for a new 11-story building here on Dec. 23, 2009, per DOB records. The City disapproved the plans later in 2010.
"I forgot what apt. + building I left from, why I didn't return on Sunday. The guy who left his shoes. Hope it was here."
CrossFit is the principal strength and conditioning program for many police academies and tactical operations teams, military special operations units, champion martial artists, and hundreds of other elite and professional athletes worldwide.
Our program delivers a fitness that is, by design, broad, general and inclusive. Our specialty is not specializing. Combat, survival, many sports and life reward this kind of fitness and, on average, punish the specialist.
The CrossFit program is designed for universal scalability, making it the perfect application for any committed individual regardless of experience. We’ve used our same routines for elderly individuals with heart disease and cage fighters one month out from televised bouts. We scale load and intensity; we don’t change programs.
The needs of Olympic athletes and our grandparents differ by degree, not kind. Our terrorist hunters, skiers, mountain bike riders and housewives have found their best fitness from the same regimen.
CrossFit is also a community of more than 4,500 gyms worldwide. Those are all local, small businesses that share the philosophies of CrossFit and legally license the CrossFit name.
When did the area immediately surrounding Astor Place (i.e. the Village) become Midtown South? Was it when 51 Astor birthed that terrifically lame office building? Did Midtown suddenly annex the rest of the world, turning Brooklyn into Midtown East and Canada into Midtown North?
We weren't the only ones surprised by the characterization of the 'hood.
"I am fairly certain that Astor and Broadway are not considered to be within our boundaries or even generically considered as Midtown South," wrote John Mudd, president of the Midtown South Community Council, in an email to the Village Voice.
Richard Bensam said...
We have to fight this. No, I don't mean Facebook moving in -- we have to fight the "Midtown South" label. Slapping a classy-sounding new name on a neighborhood can be worth millions in real estate. This name is a big deal to them. Deny them this victory. Don't use it. Don't let the developers colonize and gentrify our very language and thoughts the way they do our streets and buildings.
Alex in NYC said...
What the fuck? They call it MIDTOWN because it's in the MIDDLE OF TOWN. Astor Place, meanwhile, is DOWNTOWN, because it, by its very geography, is SOUTH (i.e. DOWN) from the MIDDLE OF TOWN.
The last thing you ever want to see when you're high #treeman twitter.com/XtinaLou/statu…
— Christina (@XtinaLou) June 5, 2013
Treeman interviewing with Village Voice Tompkins Square Park in East Village now!! #treeman @adocumentree twitter.com/Mangelo_Films/…
— Michael Angelo Films (@Mangelo_Films) June 5, 2013
The Cicada Invasion of New York City Has Been Canceled
Name: Danny Lama
Occupation: Singer / Songwriter
Location: 5th and A.
Time: 5:45 on Friday, May 30.
I’m a songwriter. I guess the way to label my music is rock, post-punk, punk. I played reggae and I played Doo-wop. I guess I’m a blues-rock player by trade.
I was born in Manhattan — in Harlem. We lived on Amsterdam Avenue but when that became the wild west we moved up to the Bronx. I was in Catholic grammar school — I’m surprised I never got thrown out. I guess it was because my parents had to pay tuition. They thought of me as the devil worshipping, cult leader, Charles Manson junior. I could not take to that God-according-to-them stuff.
The nuns once called my mother in and said, “Danny’s doing this terrible thing, he’s reading this Hunter Thompson 'Hell’s Angels' book, it’s pornographic.” And my mother said in her Irish accent that was thicker than the nuns, “That book is on The New York Times bestseller list. You should be proud. None of your readings are up to his standards. You can’t teach him to read like that. You should be thankful. A year ago he was reading comic books and now he’s reading Hunter Thompson. We pay you good money so shut up and leave his reading habits alone.” Isn’t that cool?
My mother was a nurse from Ireland. She let me go to the Fillmore East four years before anybody else. The Fillmore East brought me to this neighborhood. The music and the freedom was the thing that drew me here. My father was 20 years older than my mother. He was from a different generation. My mother used to let me go to the early shows at the Fillmore as long as I was back home in the Bronx by midnight before my father got home from work. I lost my virginity in this neighborhood. I got picked up by a woman down here — she took me back to her house on 9th street and I couldn’t leave this neighborhood once the sun went down because you’d hear screaming on the streets at night.
At the Fillmore I saw Eric Clapton, Humble Pie, Lee Michaels, Cactus. And I had tickets for the last week in ‘71 that they closed, but I got in trouble with the nuns. After that there was the Academy of Music on 14th street, which later became known as the Palladium.
Senior year of high school and freshman year of college, I was already reading poetry and getting the craft of songwriting down. The real arty punk movement was in the 70s. I was always in the neighborhood. There was a drummer in The Cramps that lived here and one thing led to another. I used to roadie at CBGBs from 75-79. I was a roadie for Talking Heads and Television. I was a kid and so I would roadie for them to get in.
I moved here officially in ‘81 or ‘82. I’ve lived in the same apartment for about 31 years. Back then I was working for a printer and then I was a ghostwriter for a jingle house, in advertising on Madison Avenue. They were just using my ideas and riffs. And then I got picked to be in a music school for the recording industry and that led to an internship, where I became a publicist for Arista Records. I worked for a publicity director for R&B and Jazz for Arista. And then I worked in retail and wholesale records because of my record collection and my knowledge of all that stuff.
In the early days I was in a band called Mona Rock, nobody will remember that, Thorns Grass, Maloney’s Touch, Espionage, The Good Life, Moving Up, Bad Politics — we were one of the house bands along with the Beastie Boys and Hi Sheriffs of Blue at a venue on the corner of A and 7th. That lasted from '81 to '85. Then there was Convulsion Cabaret in ’89. James Chance played keyboard. The guy who just died, Ray Manzarek, he played with us.
I’ll give you a little history as we’re walking. This building here on 3rd and A ... used to be a bunch of row houses of the same size. There was a woman in there who used to type up my manuscripts for poetry and lyrics. This was in the 80s and she used to run a business typing for a dollar a sheet for prose writing, poetry, song lyrics. She was very good with the poetry and the spacing. She had a great idea of the cadence and the rhythm of it without even hearing it. I really liked the way she did it. Anyway, her landlord went into the basement with a jackhammer and did a number on the main support beam. It crippled the building.
This other building around here was known as the toilet. It was actually written about in many books and novels. The toilet referred to a brand of heroin that was sold out of there. There were lines every weekday morning sometimes. Lines from the building to the corner. People in business suits on the way to work in Wall Street, waiting to buy it. It was then taken over by homesteaders. A bunch of the other surrounding buildings belonged to homesteaders as well. I used to go on the roofs around here to practice shooting guns. It was fucking crazy around here for awhile.
"[It's got] nothing to do about rent, it's about business. It can't be generalized because the neighborhood in this spot really changed. Changed so much," he explained. "I have maybe 5% of my customers left. I was fighting until the end, but it was already bad a year ago."
"I spoke with Citi Bike workers about an issue I had docking a bike at the 13th Street station. The two workers explained that someone has been vandalizing the mechanism for docking a bike at the station .... and they found four bikes with punctured tires [yesterday] morning.
"They also said it this was not the first time this station has been vandalized."